One rather distressing bit of information to come out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival is the following.

Sundance teamed up with the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. They produced a study of the 11,197 directors, writers, producers, cinematographers and editors whose movies screened in Sundance from 2002-2012. “Exploring the Barriers and Opportunities for Independent Women Filmmakers” is being billed as the most comprehensive look to date on the gender disparity facing women directors.

•Women are more likely to be producers, and as the roles become more high profile and money becomes a factor, the number of women goes down. So women are more likely to be associate producers than producers.

•One good bit of news in the report: Women support women. Films directed by women feature more women in all roles. There is a 21 percent increase in women working on a narrative film when there is a female director and a 24 percent increase in women on documentaries.

•Females direct more documentaries than narrative films — 35 percent to 17 percent. One reason is that documentaries generally are less expensive to produce.

I was just starting to get excited about women’s progress in Hollywood. Forbes Magazine last summer released its survey of the top 10 highest-earning celebrities under age 30. Taylor Swift topped the charts as No. 1, Justin Bieber, a guy of course, was No. 2 and numbers three four and five were Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. Now these young women are singers, not actresses and certainly not directors. There was one young actress on the list, Kristen Stewart. She was not in the top five. But with women making such headway in the music industry, I was hoping that women in film were not far behind. A woman can hope, after all.

One major factor cited by women in film was lack of access to the same kind of capital that male directors and writers can raise. This is not unlike women in politics, by the way, who from the beginning have cited money as what they believe to be holding them back. But women politicians have made progress on that front during the past two decades and few feel as if access to capital is the main factor holding them back.

Not so in film. Forty-three percent of women interviewed for the study stated money was the biggest problem. They feel that this lack of access to funds reinforces their beliefs that women directors are still not taken seriously in the world of independent films or in Hollywood. They want their visions for films taken seriously and that is still not happening.

Another 40 percent told interviewers that breaking into, “Male-dominated industry networking” is a major obstacle to getting films completed. This is a problem for women in almost any field. But I can see where Hollywood, which gets away with producing oversexed, overly violent flicks is one of the few remaining male bastions.

It’s a shame, too, because Hollywood is constantly under attack for many of the films it does produce. “Too pornographic” or “gratuitously violent” are frequent critiques that come to mind. If more women were producing and directing movies, it’s almost assured Hollywood’s penchant for sex and violence would calm down some.